Ampliative reasoning

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In a broad sense of both “logic” and “inference,” any rule-governed move from a number of propositions to a new one in reasoning can be considered a logical inference, if it is calculated to further one’s knowledge of a given topic. The rules that license such inferences need not be truth-preserving, but many will be ampliative, in the sense that they lead (or are likely...

Reasoning outside deductive logic is not necessarily truth-preserving even when it is formally correct. Such reasoning can add to the information that a reasoner has at his disposal and is therefore called ampliative. Ampliative reasoning can be studied by modeling knowledge-seeking as a process involving a sequence of questions and answers, interspersed by logical inference steps. In this kind...